How do I check the difference, in seconds, between two dates?
There has to be an easier way to do this. I have objects that want to be refreshed every so often, so I want to record when they were created, check against the current timestamp, and refresh as necessary.
datetime.datetime has proven to be difficult, and I don't want to dive into the ctime library. Is there anything easier for this sort of thing?
Answer
if you want to compute differences between two known dates, use total_seconds like this:
import datetime as dt
a = dt.datetime(2013,12,30,23,59,59)
b = dt.datetime(2013,12,31,23,59,59)
(b-a).total_seconds()
86400.0
#note that seconds doesn't give you what you want:
(b-a).seconds
0